The old days of making your website look like an online brochure or a product catalog are long gone. Today your company website should be at the centre of your lead generation efforts, so it can be the engine that drives your marketing and sales funnel, and the cornerstone of your market presence.
For B2B companies especially, you need to follow Inbound Marketing best practices and design an Inbound Website totally focused on lead generation.
This is because so much of today's B2B buyer's journey is already determined before you can have any influence over the decision. Your target buyer persona has already done their research online and they did it at a time and pace of their choosing.
Cold Calling Is Over
Trying to catch your buyer at just the right moment in their decision making cycle to receive a cold call from a sales rep, or a cold email from you, is a lottery and most of the time it does not work. The stats show that cold calling and emailing success rates are tumbling.
Therefore it’s time to change your approach to lead generation.
What Determines Lead Generation Success?
Lead generation success means being present where your persona is – that is, across multiple channels because you just don't know exactly which channel your buyer is using to do their research.
Are they using Google search to find interesting articles? Are they clicking on paid ads? Are they asking their peers on LinkedIn for a recommendation?
Regardless of which channel your buyer is using to do their research, all paths should lead to your website.
But not just anywhere on your site, you should carefully establish specific points of conversion, - usually Calls-To-Action (CTAs) placed on high traffic site pages or a specific blog article that is unique to that channel.
That way it is easy to track which channel is the best source of traffic and crucially, how successful that channel is at converting a visitor to become a contact (i.e. they have given you their contact information through a form). Over time, you will be able to see which channels yield the best return on effort and money spent, and as a result you can invest more heavily in optimizing the most successful lead generation channels further.
An important trend to consider here is that you will have visitors coming to your site from multiple devices. A large number of them will be mobile so its critical that your site is responsive and adapts its design to the end users viewing device (Google is now starting to penalise websites that are not responsive).
You Will Need To Offer Valuable Content
To do this properly requires careful planning and a deep understanding of your buyer’s personas, their pain points, challenges and aspirations.
Careful, detailed research should be undertaken to understand not just their demographics, but also their current list of challenges that's preventing them reaching their goals. Understand this first and developing compelling content becomes a great deal easier.
To get the conversion from a website visitor to a marketing qualified lead (MQL), your website must offer valuable content for your target buyer. Your content must attract them like a magnet, engage and compel them.
After a buyer's initial questions are answered, they are better able to define what it is they might need to solve their problems. Now they'll want to discover more about how you can help them.
Use your site to pull them deeper into their decision journey. Content that helps them understand their needs is now welcomed by the buyer.
Good websites have content such as calculators, case studies and video demos to help the buyer work out what they need. At this point the buyer is still in self-serve mode, they don't want to speak with a salesperson yet, but your website continues to assist them on their journey and you are able to exert influence over them by providing content that is closely aligned to their needs.
Tracking User Behaviour Is Crucial
By "scoring" a marketing lead's behaviour you are able to determine when a lead is Sales Qualified (SQL) and ready to be followed up by your sales team.
As you have been tracking this potential buyer’s behaviour you should be able to deliver a rich stream of information to the sales rep. This is the principle reason for the significantly higher close rates of leads generated from this type Inbound lead generation.
In summary, to make you website a lead generation engine, these are the basics of your website must do:
- Understand your buyer’s persona and their journey to solve a problem
- Communicate with all the channels your buyer’s use
- Make sure your website is 100% mobile responsive for multiple devices
- Incorporate points of conversion, CTAs across all your website pages
- Create compelling and valuable content suitable for generating awareness and consideration
- Create easy-to-use reports so you can develop the site based on real user behaviour data
- Determine a lead scoring process to show the leads are qualified for sales, before you pass them over
- Integrate with your sales team's tools such as your CRM
THE BRIT AGENCY is a B2B Inbound Marketing Agency providing Inbound Marketing, Inbound Website Design and Inbound Sales services to companies around the world. We're focused on growing website traffic, qualified leads and sales, using the Inbound lead generation and marketing automation process.
THE BRIT AGENCY is a Certified Platinum Tier Hubspot Partner, a HubSpot CMS and GDD certified Inbound Website Design Agency, a Shopify eCommerce Partner, and a certified "Google Badged Agency Partner". We have offices in Toronto and Barrie, Canada, and Salisbury, UK.
